602
PARTISAN REVIEW
tive
is
merely the animal right, in its extreme form, to move unhindered
and enjoy the risks and benefits of the rootless life. A rooted society is
a sick one, it is an asylum from the fear of animal freedom. A healthy
society, which is neither rooted nor uprooted-its forms are appropriate
to animals, not plants--encourages mobility among its traditions, with
everyone's right assured to pick and cultivate what he pleases, provided
it does no harm. It is full of eccentrics and outsiders, people on the
margin between alternative worlds; but the health of a society is not to
be measured by a uniformity of type among its members. One measure
is its ability to encounter without anxiety, and to learn from the rootless
intellectual, who, precisely because he is rootless, is free to move among
values in search of the best-as, in the ultimate paradox of her life,
was Simone Weil herself.
Isaac Rosenfeld
TWO ITALIANS
THE FANCY DRESS PARTY. By Alberto Morovio. Tronsloted from the
Itolion by Angus Dovidson. Forror, Strous
&
Young. $3 .00.
THE RED CARNATION. By Elio Vittorini. Tronsloted from the Itolion by
Anthony Bower. New Dire ctions. $3.00.
The Fancy Dress Party
is not Alberto Moravia at his best.
Published in Italy in 1941 and subsequently banned by the Fascist
authorities, the book has a certain interest in the mere agility of its
elaborate satirical-farcical tone, its undoubtedly clever drawing and
placing of character and situation as close to the actuality of Fascist
Italy at that moment as possible. But read simply as a novel, now that
the political exigencies against which it was directed have disappeared,
or at least re-formed, it seems very thin indeed- a flimsily constructed
and rather unrewarding set-piece, with none of the richness of texture
or psychological penetration of Moravia's more recent
Conjugal Love
or of his quiet novella "Disobedience" in
T wo Adolescents.
The Fancy Dress Party
is probably more successful on its own terms
-which are those of an "entertainment"- than
The Conformist,
pub–
lished here last year, in which Moravia attempted to deal straightfor–
wardly with certain ideas of political and moral responsibility. But the
two novels are not really comparable. Although
The Fancy Dress Party
is about an attempt upon the life of a dictator, General Tereso Arango,
in a musical-comedy country, Ruritania, and about the General's pur–
suit of an extremely desirable young widow, Fausta Sanchez, it is not
really concerned with the perils and exactions of power: the subject is
rather, pure complication.
